‘Featherhood’ describes the ties that bind us to our fellow creatures

Throughout his engrossing new memoir, British writer Charlie Gilmour offers up assorted bits of avian lore. For example, it turns out that magpies – birds known for their intelligence, dark plumage, and association with misfortune – have a sort of primitive social safety net for young members of their species that have been orphaned. “In nests where, for one reason or another, the male parent has gone missing, ornithologists have observed magpies stepping in to court the female and even care for her offspring as if they were his own,” Gilmour writes, adding, “Magpies, it seems, are capable of acting outside their immediate biological interest; one might even say they are kind.” 

By the time readers reach this particular passage in Gilmour’s alternately touching and humorous book “Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie,” the idea of the author meditating on the apparently anthropomorphic qualities of magpies will not seem so unusual. Following in the path blazed by Helen Macdonald’s prize-winning memoir “H is for Hawk” – an antecedent that Gilmour recognizes and honors here – this memoir uses the author’s experiences with a magpie as a springboard to a larger discussion of family bonds, principally his relationship with his biological, albeit absentee, father, the profoundly eccentric playwright and poet Heathcote Williams.

Although the book deftly interweaves seemingly disparate threads, the narrative itself begins straightforwardly enough: Gilmour’s fiancée, Yana, brings home an injured baby magpie in a cardboard box. Although childless themselves at this point, he and Yana are seized by parental instincts. “The magpie’s life still feels far from certain – it’s barely strong enough to support the miniscule weight of its own head and it still shakes and convulses horribly – but under Yana’s protective wing the frequency of its fits is lessening,” writes Gilmour, who, perceiving “an intelligence lurking behind those pale gemstone eyes,” slowly gets pulled into nursing the bird back to health. 

Although there are surely fewer surrogate parents of magpies than there are dog lovers and cat fanciers, anyone who has ever cared for a living creature will find much to identify with in Gilmour’s affectionate, sometimes exasperated account of the magpie who comes to be called Benzene. Expecting to be fed, the magpie opens its beak wide upon the mere sight of “father bird” Gilmour, who worries that the impressionable creature is missing crucial lessons in the wild as it hangs around its humans, “cocking its head to one side as I sharpen a pencil and tracking the rough ribbons of wood as they fall into the wastepaper basket.” Gilmour becomes fond of Benzene, whose flights fill his protector with mixed emotions: “I want him to fly away. I want him to stay.” 

Such sentiments make the author’s parallel story all the more powerful: Diving deep into his past, Gilmour recounts the painful absence of his father, who unaccountably abandoned his lover and 6-month-old son. “Babies, I thought, must be terrible things, if having one is enough to turn a man mad and make him run for years without looking back,” reflects Gilmour, whose mother eventually married musician David Gilmour. 

The book’s threads come together when Charlie Gilmour, after years of frustratingly intermittent contact with his father, resolves to reconnect upon learning that – in a bit of delightful synchronicity – Williams had once owned a jackdaw and penned a poem about the creature. Renewing their acquaintance, Gilmour doesn’t overlook the fact that his relationship with his now-ailing father can never be what it could have been, and when Williams dies, he admits to ambiguous feelings: “What I’ve lost isn’t a person – I’ve hardly spent twenty hours with him in the last twenty years – but the hope of knowing a person.” 

Yet, in the emotional stew of finding Benzene and losing his father, Gilmour comes to better understand the ties that bind living beings together. This is expressed most palpably when he and Yana become parents to a daughter. 

Gilmore concludes with an epilogue titled “Useful Information,” which offers some advice to amateur birders who might be inspired by this book. Most birds that appear to need help are likely OK, Gilmour writes: “Unless the animal is sick, or injured, or in obvious immediate danger, nonintervention is often the best approach.” 

At once droll and wise, this is an unforgettable memoir.